Alejandro Oviedo
Preface
I am not questioning the importance of the fundamental discovery that signed languages have sublexical structures and are in other ways like spoken languages. I am suggesting that there are other properties of signed languages that are equally important and interesting but quite unlike those of spoken languages. These differences are deserving of increasing attention from the scientific community. In fact, the linguistics of signed languages is moving in this direction as it begins to examine the use of space by signers (...) and other issues concerning the iconic and metaphoric bases of sign creation. (D. Armstrong)
This study deals with classifiers, which are a group of signs in Venezuelan Sign Language LSV (Spanish abbreviation for Lengua de Seņas Venezolana). Classifiers have also been observed and described in sign languages from many other countries (cf. Schembri 2000). The formal parts of these signs (i.e. their handshapes, movements, locations, etc.) iconically correspond to the meanings they convey, which allows signers to elaborate visually transparent representations of the spatial activity of entities and the physical aspect of objects. This transparency is evident even to people who are not familiar with sign languages, which means that classifiers cannot easily be described in the usual way of traditional linguistic categories. In this sense, classifiers are apparently a semiotic phenomenon without a counterpart in spoken languages.
The description of classifiers has been challenging sign linguistics since its inception, and scholars are not yet in agreement as to how to describe them. There are two different aspects in the description of classifiers that have proved particularly interesting: the first is how to arrange classifiers into fixed and well-defined categories; the second concerns the discussion about their semiotic nature. The first aspect has been extensively discussed, but there is no agreement among scholars with regard to many of the details. The main reason for the lack of agreement is because of the problems posed by the semiotic nature of classifiers, and relatively few studies have addressed these problems.